Maintaining Power

Stephen Prothero hits Mormon political leaders for their cowardice over the Park 51 controversy:

I thought that Romney, as a Mormon, might speak out passionately for the First Amendment. I thought he might remember how the founder of his religion, Joseph Smith Jr., was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob. I thought he might recall how the U.S. government brought down much of its coercive power against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Apparently not. According to a statement released on August 10 by his spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom, “Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site."

More recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, also a Mormon, opened the floodgates for what will likely be a steady stream of Democratic equivocation on this important issue. "The First Amendment protects freedom of religion," Reid’s spokesman Jim Manley said in an August 16 statement. "Sen. Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else.”

This thought occurred to me a few weeks ago when Harry Reid came out against the mosque. The story of Mormonism is the story of American religious intolerance. In some cases, the Mormons of the 1800s gave reason for the wariness they encountered. But, the hatred, the violence, and the government instituted campaign against them were responses that could not possibly be justified. The governor of Missouri in 1838, Lilburn Boggs, issued an extermination order against Mormons:

The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary, for the public peace-their outrages are beyond all description.

Mormons were not welcome in New York, Ohio, Missouri, or Illinois. The opposition towards them focused on a number of moral outrages, but the strongest of these was the practice of polygamy. Consider this analogy please: Mormonism is to polygamy as Islam is to radicalism. Some Mormons did practice polygamy, but it was very few of them. The same is true of Muslims. There are those that subscribe to radicalism, but it is by far the minority within Islam. Yet, as all Mormons were painted with the brush of polygamy, all Muslims now are painted with the brush of radicalism.

Of course, the moral outrages of the Mormons were go-to arguments for those who were afraid of losing their political, economic, and cultural power. Mormons during the nineteenth century voted as a bloc and created closed economic systems (as opposed to the Amish, who, although they have a somewhat closed community, still trade and deal with outsiders). Joseph Smith, the prophet and president of Mormonism, also created a Mormon militia called the Nauvoo Legion, named himself mayor and chief justice of Nauvoo Illinois, and ran for President of the United States. In other words, he was taking on image of a theocrat. Mormons and Joseph Smith encountered distrust because of all these things, but polygamy was always the lodestone of anti-Mormonism. The lens of anti-Islam forces is a mosque (or more accurately mosques). But, much like Mormons and polygamy, the religious intolerance directed at Muslims is not really about the building of mosques no matter where they are. It's about maintaining the power of those that already have it. The perception is "American culture" is under threat and frankly it is understandable considering the horrific nature of what the worst of Islam has wrought, just like it is understandable that Mormons were met with distrust. But that doesn't make it right.

Modern Mormons should understand this better than most and Reid and Mitt Romney should not trade the moral authority of their faith for the lowest of their political base. But, as any sociologist will tell you, once an out-group gets accepted into the in-group, they won't do anything to help all the other out-groups. They often just make things worse.